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I've been using the Benchmate nearly a year now, and I like it's simplicity. You can do as many bottles per hour as you can carry away, cause the time it takes is not in labelling but in removing the unlabelled and labelled bottles. A few hundred bottles per hour is normal.

I don't mean to be a downer... and these machines may be worth it. I don't have experience with either, but we have hand labelled our bottles for three years now (ouch!) and we're finally moving into larger production where we'll be using a labeler. We bottle about 3500 bottles per week right now.

One thing I'm certain about is that I'm faster hand labeling than any of these small table top machines rated for 500 - 600 btls/hour. Not that I'm thrilled about it!

I'm also in the market for some sort of labeler, so I'm glad you posted these. Certainly more affordable then the fully automatic stuff I'm dreaming about.

The rational would be my choice from an ergonomics perpective, as its the only semi-auto type I've seen with the bottle oriented pointing at the user. From the video, it looks like you could really get your speeds up by being able to conveniently grab the bottle necks for on and off-load. Their site quotes 1600 cph, which isn't half bad, IMO.

As Markku said about the BenchMate, the time waster is in container placement, looks like the Rational has it beat in that way. What will you guys do for date coding?